Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged stability →  View Popular

My bottom line is that the people we met are very cognitively captured, assuming one can take their remarks at face value. Although they kept stressing all the things that had changed or they were planning to change, the polite pushback from pretty all the attendees was that what Treasury thought of as major progress was insufficient.

But the other fact is that these guys are very smooth, very smart, and seemed quite sincere, which made it difficult to discern how much they really did believe and how much of what they said they had to say because they need to defend official policy and maintain confidence.

The Europeans see this as an attempt to place their banking sectors at a disadvantage in relation to US banks. The big US banks already have larger capital reserves than their European competitors, in part because of the massive scale of the US bailout of Wall Street, and could more easily meet such requirements.

The article makes clear that at the heart of the rescue of AIG was a decision to use taxpayer funds to cover dollar for dollar the billions owed by the insurance firm to Wall Street banks that held credit default swap contracts with AIG

Paulson and his collaborators in orchestrating the bank bailout, including Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now Obama’s treasury secretary, were well aware of the legal implications of Paulson’s role in rescuing Goldman with public funds.

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These are the kind of people Anglo news crews glom onto like horny refrigerator magnets: young, well-dressed, a lot of them speak English, and they talk about nice familiar stuff like “freedom” and “democracy.” They make great TV. But they can’t win a war. You win wars with poor people, numbers and toughness and discipline.

That’s because the IRI government is a bunch of rival militias, intelligence agencies, and religious committees. There’s even a legislature, although nobody takes that seriously. If you remember the way the Iranian side was organized in the Iran/Iraq war, you might have a better idea how the people at the top like things to run: always with rival forces competing for power. That’s because Khomeini was thinking coups in 1979. So alongside the regular Army he set up the Revolutionary Guards, hardcore jihadis loyal to the Supreme Leader, not the Army Brass. To make sure the Revolutionary Guards weren’t vulnerable to a sudden decapitation by the army or anyone else, their cadres were placed with every agency, like Islamist commissars, and they set up militias in every city in Iran.

In the last quarter of 2008, Brazil’s industrial output dropped by 19%. Eight hundred thousand workers lost their jobs between October and January (nearly 1% of the workforce), and that doesn’t even begin to take account of job losses in the informal economy, which employs around 40% of Brazilian workers. Half a million Brazilians have found themselves back in poverty or extreme poverty.

Imports leapt by 52.7% between the first and second half of 1994. As a result, many Brazilian businesses closed or had to go into partnership with foreign companies, which accounted for 70% of Brazilian mergers and acquisitions between 1995 and 1999. Somewhat amazed by the brazenness of this denationalisation programme, the staunchly pro-liberalisation Veja magazine observed that “the history of capitalism has rarely seen the transfer of control on such a scale in such a short period” (7).